Building Oracle RAC Part II , Install virtual disk and network card

This is Part II of Step by Step RAC configuration on your laptop/desktop without investing anything extra on hardware (Free) using virtual server, virtual hard disk and virtual network cards.

For first two posts visit
Try installing Orcale RAC on your laptop
RAC Part I – Install Virtual Machine and Linux

In this Part II, We will install required linux operating package for clusterware & database, additional hard disk (voting disk, ocr and ASM), network card for interconnect and configure newly added hard disk and network card.

Install rpm’s
————————

Install following rpm’s (These rpm’s are in Red Hat ES CD’s or download them from rhn.redhat.com ) and install them using root account

(compat-glibc-7.x-2.2.4.32.6.i386.rpm, gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-34.2.i386.rpm, sysstat-4.0.7-4.EL3.3.i386.rpm )

rpm –ivh compat-glibc-7.x-2.2.4.32.6.i386.rpm
rpm –ivh gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-34.2.i386.rpm
rpm –ivh sysstat-4.0.7-4.EL3.3.i386.rpm

Create Shared Disk on Virtual Machine for Cluster Registry, Voting Disk and ASM
————————————————————
–Shutdown linux machine RAC1 (installed in part I) as “shutdown now” (from root user)
–Create folder “shared” in location “c:\atul\VMWARE” (or any other location of your choice)
–From VM Ware Console Press Ctrl + D to see Virtual Machine Settings

Or from screen

Click on Edit Virtual Machine Setting

Click on Add

Click on Next

Select Hard Disk as shown here and click Next

Select Create a New Virtual Disk and click Next

Select SCSI and click Next

Select 5.0 GB for voting disk and 5.0 GB for ocr (add second disk of 5 GB for ocr using same method) and 8 GB for asm (add third disk of 8 GB for ASM using same method)

Enter location and disk file name in folder shared created above.

Note* Select votingDisk for disk one created , ocr for second disk created and asm for third disk created . This name doesn’t matter and this is for our understanding only.

Click Finish

Repeat above step of adding disk for ocr and asm. Finally you should see Hard Disk 2,3,4

Hard Disk 2 : for votingDisk (5 GB)

Hard Disk 3 : for ocr (5 GB)

Hard Disk 4 : for ASM (8GB)

This completes addition of hard disk (How to configure and share these hard disks coming next ..)

Adding Network Card for Interconnect

—————————-

Next step is to create network card, there is already an existing network card which is used as public connection for connecting to this machine and database isnatance on this machine and new card will be used oracle clusterware as private inerconnect between two nodes of RAC i.e. RAC1 and RAC2. This private interconnect is used for clusterware talking to all remote nodes in cluster.

From VMWare Console press Ctrl + D

Select Ethernet Adapter this time and click Next

Select Bridged and click Finish

Now Start your linux Virtual MachineOn start of linux Virtual Machine you linux machine will detect newly added network card which you can configure now (at boot time only) or you can configure later as well.

Press Any Key to enter into setup part of network card

Select Configure and click enetr or you can configure it later as well

Enter following details

IP Address —————–192.168.0.101
Netmask ——————- 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway ——— 192.168.0.254
Primary Nameserver —- 192.168.0.1

and select OK and press enter

Above we configured newly added network card eth1 (used for interconnect).

With below method we will configure original network card (for public connection)Syetem Setting -> Network

select eth0 and click Edit

Add entry like
———————-
Address 192.168.1.101
Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway Address 192.168.0.254Click OK and activate this netowrk card

Activate eth0 by clicking on Activate button

Click on Yes, when prompted to save network configuration

Now you should see both network card eth0 and eth1 as Active
ifconfig , from root should show you result as shown in screenshot

Format and Configure Virtual disks (voting disk, ocr and asm )
—————————————————-In this step We will format and configure Virtual Disks created above.

From user root

fdisk –l (This is to see list of disks, You will see entry like /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd doesn’t contain valid partition table)

fdisk /dev/sdb (Means we are dealing with /dev/sdb)
n (Create new disk)
p (Of type primary partition)
1 (First Cylinder)
Enter (carriage return)
Enter (carriage return)
w (Save table to disk and exit)

(For more information check man fdisk or below screenshot)

Repeat above step for /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd

So now fdisk –l you should details of /dev/sdb, dev/sdc, dev/sdd

–Add These disks as raw devices in file /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices as
/dev/raw/raw1 /dev/sdb1
/dev/raw/raw2 /dev/sdc1
/dev/raw/raw3 /dev/sdd1
–Restart rawdevices service as service rawdevices restart

Create directory /apps/oracle/oradata (For storing voting disk, ocr and ASM) asmkdir –p /apps/oracle/oradata (From Root Account)

–>Create symbolic link pointing to these raw devices so that we know which one is for what (Optional)

ln –s /dev/raw/raw1 /apps/oracle/oradata/ocr

ln –s /dev/raw/raw2 /apps/oracle/oradata/votingdisk

ln –s /dev/raw/raw3 /apps/oracle/oradata/asm

–Change ownership of these directories to oracle:oracle

chown oracle:oracle /dev/raw/raw1

chown oracle:oracle /dev/raw/raw2

chown oracle:oracle /dev/raw/raw3
Shutdown this machine as this is now ready to clone and to create RAC2 machine.

Coming Next

-Cloning RAC1 to RAC2

-Changing RAC2 network and hostname details

-Configuring user equivalency

-Installing clusterware 10.2.0.1

-Installing Oracle rac database 10.2.0.1

-Tips and Tricks of troubleshooting Oracle RAC Database and clusterware…..

About the Author Atul Kumar

Oracle ACE, Author, Speaker and Founder of K21 Technologies & K21 Academy : Specialising in Design, Implement, and Trainings.

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28 comments

fhasweh says July 13, 2007

nice post keep them up
fadi

Atul Kumar says July 13, 2007

Thanks Fadi.

Alok says July 13, 2007

Atul,
I accidently stumbled upon your blog and I was stunned to see the amount of clarity and simplicity you put in your posts.

Kudos to you for making a complex thing as RAC sound so easy with your screenshots and instructions.

Keep up the good work.

Atul Kumar says July 13, 2007

Hi Alok,
Thanks for such a Nice compliment 🙂

Babu B says July 14, 2007

Hi kumar,

nice post, i’m learn new thinks.. If possible vmware config. in suse linux 9.3

babu

Atul Kumar says July 14, 2007

Hi Babu, Follow same steps in suse 9 and update here if you hit some issues

Vamsi Chikkam says July 14, 2007

Hi Atul,

First I would I like to thanks for the excellent post.

I m following up with your blog and learning lot of things.

I m using RHAS3 instead of Red Hat Linux ES 3. Found following 3 rpm are dependencies for 3 rpm files mentioned in the post:

1) gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-34.1.i386.rpm
2) libpng10-1.0.13-8.i386.rpm
3) ORBit-0.5.17-10.4.i386.rpm

Vamsi Chikkam

Atul Kumar says July 14, 2007

Hi Vamasi ,
Thanks for sharing this information with readers. If you install package list as mentioned in RedHat install in previous doc these rpm’s will authomatically be installed

Anonymous says July 26, 2007

Hi,

Is it mandatory to go with SCSI? or can we create hard disks for votingdisk,ocr using IDE.I am trying to configure RAC on VM. but got stuked here.

Thanks,
appsdba

Atul Kumar says July 26, 2007

SCSI is not requirement you can try with IDE as well but I SCSI is recommended.

Anonymous says September 24, 2007

Actually you don’t need the voting disk to be 5GB, do you? 512M is enough?

Atul Kumar says September 24, 2007

Yes this is right that we don’t need voting disk of 5 GB and 250 MB is enough. Extra Hard disk if you need more voting disk but still I think 5 GB is too much may be 1 GB is more than enough

Anonymous says September 24, 2007

Thanks for you prompt reply. It is like get authorization from the guru. will use 250MB for my implementation.

Akbar says November 18, 2007

Hi ,
I have installed Enterprise Linux using vmware on my windowxp laptop

I am stuck at this step.

1) First there is no rawdevices file at /etc/sysconfig folder.
2) I create the rawdevices file and added the above line. But when i execute
service rawdevices restart
I get the following error.

rawdevices: unrecognized error.

I have following question

1) How can i solve this error ?

Also i can find /dev/sdb1 , /dev/sdc1 , /dev/sdd1
But i couldn’t find /dev/raw/raw1 , /dev/raw/raw2 , /dev/raw/raw3

2) As /dev/raw/raw1 doesn’t exist on my machine. How can i create this ? Do i have to mount /dev/sdb1 to /dev/raw/raw1 …..

Please help me to move ahead of this above problem.

Thanks,
Akbar Husen shaikh

Haiying says December 6, 2007

Thanks for the valueble posting. I would like to know how do you format sdb1, sdc1, and sdd1 after you created patitions.

Thanks,

Haiying

Haiying says December 6, 2007

Discussing with Akbar: You can try
cd /dev/raw
while ((i<= 10))
do
mknod raw$i c 162 $i
let i=i+1
done

Pourreza says February 28, 2008

My host , VM1 and VM2 are Win 2003 enterprise edition
i create five shared disks
i clone RAC2 Virtual machine by RAC1
if i want start both VM1 and VM2 at the same time
i have an error :
“Cannot open the disk ‘C:\Shared\ocr.vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
Reason: Failed to lock the file.”

Please Help Me

Mariano says July 2, 2008

Hi.
I have the same problem!!!
Te solution is:
add into archive.vmx ‘disk.locking = “FALSE”‘ this is for linux.

Bye.

revanth says July 23, 2008

hi,
please send me the clusterware using cluster file system .

Thanks,
Revanth

mm says January 15, 2009

Hi Atul
U have used RHEL 3..Will RHEL4 work with the same database versions

Reagards
mm

Atul Kumar says January 15, 2009

Yes it will

Eijaz says June 23, 2009

Hi,
Atul
This my 1st 10gRAC Implementation on Sparch Solaris10. I plan to go for ASM.

Storage Guy have Given me 500GB Disk from Storage
Now i Bit Confuse, How to Create Raw Devices and how to Mapping for use ASM,ocr and votingdisk.

Thanks.

Ram says July 9, 2009

Hi Atul,

We are unable to see screenshots in the above post.

Can you please check

Prashanth says January 18, 2010

Hi Atul,

I am trying to configure RAC using vmware 2.0 and Red hat Linux Enterprise 5.

After I configure all the virtual disks for OCR,Voting Disk and ASM. I add the line disk.locking=false in the vmx file.
After that if I try to start the Linux Virtual machine I get the error saying cant open vmx file, syntax error.
Can you advice if there is a specific syntax for adding in the vmx file.
The virtual machine doesnt startup after I make the change.

Thanks
Prashanth

Kunal says March 5, 2010

Hi,
I tried to install Clusterware on VMWare but everytime while running the root.sh it gives error that /dev/raw/raw1 is inaccessible 🙁 and the process fails for 2nd node, however Clusters are up and online on node1. Your comments on this please.

Atul Kumar says March 5, 2010

@ Kunal,

Check Permission on Voting Disk and OCR (here dba is group of user installing RAC, and oracle is user owning RAC)

OCR
root:dba
File Permission 640

Voting Disk
oracle:dba
File Permission 640

For more on file permission in RAC visit here

Ramya says July 6, 2010

Hi,

Facing issue while activating eth0 & eth1. The system prompts the error message as
Cannot activate device:eth0
“Error, some other host already uses address
192.xxxxxx”

where to buy authentic jordans says October 1, 2012

I value the blog post.Thanks Again. Will read on…

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